Through the lens of two Palestinian museum histories, this paper sketches out political, economic, and ideological shifts in Palestinian cultural production from the anti-imperial solidarity efforts of the 1960s and 1970s, to current debates that measure culture against market logic. Weaving an indeterminate link between the recently established Palestinian Museum, and an unrealized museum plan for Palestine, initiated in the 1970s by the Palestinian Liberation Organisation Plastic Arts Section, this paper traces shifts in the political economy of cultural production. I consider how such shifts have introduced new processes of ‘“transnational cultural brokering” (Yudice, 1996), enabled by private and international investment by cultural intermediaries, at home and abroad. By looking back to the 1970s when artistic production was driven by a shared political vision for the future—strengthened by a transnational solidarity movement—it offers a counterpoint to consider how cultural production today has moved closer to the interests of a neoliberal(izing) art industry. I begin by examining the 1978 International Art Exhibition for Palestine in Beirut—a notable, and until recently, undocumented exhibition history that set in motion a seed collection for a ‘Museum of Solidarity with Palestine’. Enabled by the collective efforts of Arab and international artists, the exhibition would remain itinerant until the works could be repatriated to Palestine. Although much of the collection for the exhibition was destroyed during Israel’s siege of Beirut in 1982, a partial reclamation of its history has been brought into curatorial focus through the extensive research efforts of Kristine Khouri and Rasha Salti through an archival and documentary exhibition titled Past Disquiet: Narrative and Ghosts from the International Art Exhibition for Palestine. It is within this ruptured art historical narrative that I situate my discussion of the Palestinian Museum which opened in Birzeit in May 2016. Through an interrogation of the processes that brought the Palestinian Museum into being, this paper seeks to develop a discourse on the political in contemporary Palestinian art today. Drawing on the archival material of the 1978 exhibition, as well as interviews with art interlocutors in Beirut and Palestine, I consider whether the Museum’s position within a networked art market offers the potential for new political and artistic alliances to be formed. Or, whether reinforcing the capitalist logic of market integration that dominates cultural development today, risks neutralizing, or indeed placating, more radical forms of expression and political critique.